LIBERATION AND THEOLOGY

IN A PRAGUE EMBRACING NEW FREEDOMS, IVAN KLIMA CREATES A CLERGYMAN FACING NEW QUESTIONS

Author: By Askold Melnyczuk

Date: SUNDAY, January 18, 1998

Page: L1

Section: Books

Daniel sounds more like Rabbit Angstrom than Ivan Karamazov. Fortunately, he hasn't quite reached the level of disillusionment that leads Clarence Wilmot, the hero of John Updike's ``In the Beauty of the Lilies,'' to quit his job as a Presbyterian minister and become an encyclopedia salesman -- although that's the direction in which Daniel's heading. In this utterly absorbing book, Klima's diagnosis of the spiritual condition of his corner of Eastern Europe encourages readers to compare the patients from the East with those laid out in the Western wing.

As suspense fiction of the highest order (dispite winning the Worst Title of the Year award), ``The Ultimate Intimacy'' belongs on the shelf beside Graham Greene's ``The End of the Affair.'' It is a compelling examination of different kinds of love. Whom does Daniel love more truly: his children, his wife, his mistress, or his God? Daniel confides in his diary: ``I am faithful but incapable of being intimate. With Him still, maybe, but not with people.'' When at last he finds a woman with whom he connects on all levels, his fidelity to the others feels severely compromised. Is it possible to behave responsibly toward everyone? (Klima seamlessly weaves a variety of techniques in telling his story, relying on narrative, exchanges of letters between characters, and journal entries. Each section of the novel enlarges our understanding of the characters, who always surprise us by being deeper than we'd expected.)

The book's central achievement, though, is to remind us of fiction's singular capacity for examining characters grappling with substantial issues: a fissured faith, the temptations of materialiam, the death of a parent, a father's responsibility to his children. Moreover, even the minor figures here breathe. Klima understands the petty criminal, the yearning wife, the adulterous minister, and feels equal compassion for all. By revealing to us the characters' private motivations, which they do not necessarily share with each other, he allows us to form judgments that are perhaps less generous and understanding -- we see how egotistical ``love'' can be, how the lovers' self-absorption is more than incidentally destructive. Yet, even as you are moved to condemn them, you admire the ferocity of their attachment. Like Paolo and Francesca, Daniel and Bara are willing to face the consequences of their desire. Passion means suffering; and yet what binds this pair of ill-suited illicits transcends passion.

Daniel Vedra is an exceptionally appealing character. His charitable acts spring from a nature committed to kindness and turning the other cheek. He spontaneously offers to pay for an expensive operation for a stranger, a manual laborer whose case he hears about when visiting the hospital. Although he is a sometime televangelist, his Christianity seems utterly sincere -- he's kindly and directed, and there's little cant or posturing about him. He does, however, seem to try to believe in the mystery of Jesus Christ -- and despite the hypocrisy of his adultery, his behavior suggests the subtle motions of grace.

Bara, the seductress who tempts Daniel away from his family, is a wonderfully complex creation who seems at times manipulative and destructive, at others, attractive and poignant. When Daniel discusses Jesus with her, she believes his ``lofty phrases are just sublimated desire.'' The cliche is that it's always easy to justify adultery by proposing that the character is trapped in a bad marriage. Part of the power of Klima's creation stems from his writing characters strong enough to claim at least partial responsibility for their fates -- the debacle of Bara's marriage is also part of her own making.

Klima's countryman Milan Kundera has noted that, historically, the novel has been much more than just a mirror in which the West has examined its latest wrinkles -- it has been above all the art of the impossible, relying on the imagination as a means for exploring as-yet hidden regions of the psyche. It is the imagination, Kundera argues, that has created for us our image of what it means to be an individual, possessing free will and a soul. And, while in the age of the masses it's not surprising to hear various attacks on the excesses of Western individualism, the concept of the individual remains the West's most significant contribution to human evolution.

On comparing the patients on Updike's table to those on Klima's, one is inclined to conclude it's the latter who are healthier. And that is a puzzle. How is it that the natives of a country until recently enslaved by malevolent neighbors are holding up better than the free citizens of the wealthiest and most powerful democracy on the planet? Why is Daniel still wrestling with his doubts, finding within himself just enough faith to keep on, when his counterpart in Updike's novel, his inner light extinguished, has already surrendered to the external glow of the movies?

This universal story is grounded in history and provides us with a revealing portrait of the lingering consequences of the communist experiment, which remains one of the most fantastic material quests in human history. In Slovakia and the Czech Republic, and, I suspect, in other nations in the region, people continue to confront the distortions and dislocations produced by the previous regime. Daniel, for instance, finds his father's name on a list of police informers, and one subplot concerns his efforts to determine the degree of his complicity. Yet there's no denying that the new world is different from the old. And this difference is effectively dramatized by a development that gets all the action going in the first place.

The state has recently returned to Daniel a house his father owned in the days before private property was absorbed by the commonwealth. By selling the house, Daniel receives a windfall of cash. It's an experience he's never had before; you might say this novel examines what it means to have capital, which offers its possessor a unique purchase on freedom. What are the effects of near-total material freedom on the modern soul? Is it, in fact, liberating?

Reading this intimate look at the private lives of Eastern Europeans, I felt a palpable excitement. This is a book charged with a quiet yet urgent wisdom. One minor figure, Matous, who survived in the old regime by immersing himself in Chinese studies, comments on the new world of possibilities suddenly open to his kinsmen: ``Superficially it looked as if prosperity had come to those parts whereas in fact they had been overrun by poverty, both material and spiritual.''

Klima is not in the least polemical. His story, compelling and profound, is grounded in the dramas of his characters' lives. Even at the very end, when you think Daniel has been lost, by settling for a familiar compromise, the novel's final page suggests that our actions may carry consequences beyond those we had imagined.